Posts tagged with: United Nations Population Fund

There are people like Margaret Sanger, Dr. Karan Singh and Rudolf Hess who believed that certain people had no right to reproduce, and they worked very hard to make that so. Whether done for population control or for reasons of eugenics, forced sterilization has a long and sordid history.

Arina O. Grossu at Aletetia has done a nice job of summing up this ugly practice. Whether it’s here in the U.S. or abroad, forcing people to be sterilized (often without their knowledge) is a crime against humanity. St. John Paul II spoke of this in his encyclical, Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life):

The Pharaoh of old, haunted by the presence and increase of the children of Israel, submitted them to every kind of oppression and ordered that every male child born of the Hebrew women was to be killed (cf. Ex 1:7-22). Today not a few of the powerful of the earth act in the same way. They too are haunted by the current demographic growth, and fear that the most prolific and poorest peoples represent a threat for the well-being and peace of their own countries. Consequently, rather than wishing to face and solve these serious problems with respect for the dignity of individuals and families and for every person’s inviolable right to life, they prefer to promote and impose by whatever means a massive programme of birth control. Even the economic help which they would be ready to give is unjustly made conditional on the acceptance of an anti-birth policy.

Every year on October 11, the United Nations celebrates the Day of the Girl. This year’s theme focuses on technology and education. Many of the U.N.’s goals for highlighting education are admirable; after all, we’ve seen recently in the news how Malala Yousafzai, the 16 year old Pakistani, was shot in the face by the Taliban for promoting education for girls and women.

Cultural prejudices are not the only issues facing the education of girls. There are problems with transportation, family priorities (being able to afford to educate only one child – typically a boy), sanitary issues (girls missing school due to the lack of sanitary supplies for their menstrual cycle), and marrying off girls at young ages. It doesn’t take any leap of intellect to know that by educating girls, poverty recedes. (more…)